#1572 – An Experiment: A Paperless Trip

I decided to do an experiment in my recent weekend trip to Oslo: the experiment of a “paperless trip”. Yes, paperless as in I did not bring any pre-arranged paper for any purpose during the trip, e.g. no printed hotel booking confirmation, no printed flight itinerary, no printed boarding pass, no printed map of the hotel, etc. Btw, yes, admittedly, I always brought some, if not all, of the above mentioned items while travelling before, haha😛 .

When I was young(er), I was a hardcore pro for the greener Earth movement, however you’d like to call it. I still am, btw, don’t take it wrongly. However, admittedly lately at work I have been bad, haha😆 . The nature of my PhD research forces me to use a lot of paper: for a lot of my own calculation, reviewing stuffs, reading articles, etc. So it feels like an impossible mission to use even less paper at work than before. Therefore, I am trying to compensate in other parts of my life, whenever I can. My travel is one area I am currently looking at for this.

A random picture of Oslo as a bit of a filler here😛

First of all, this is only possible obviously because of technology. Nowadays everything is so easy that we can use our smartphone for practically anything. But because at the same time I did not want to make my trip a hell if this turned out to not be the best idea, I decided to test the water with a destination where I thought the chance of success was high: one of my city trips in Europe where I felt like the infrastructure (read: the internet and wifi connection) supported it. So I picked my Oslo trip as a test case.

How did it go?

Well, for my flights to/from Oslo, I flew with KLM. And with KLM we can check-in online and ask them to send our e-boarding pass to our email from where we can download it to our smartphone. The e-boarding pass is able to assist us through any necessary procedures at the airport, through its QR-code, like for checking-in our luggage, as an identification for the security check, and also boarding. Just like what a normal boarding pass will do. My e-boarding-pass for my flight to Oslo looked like this:

A KLM e-boarding pass

If we are unable to check in online (hence we cannot get the e-boarding pass), KLM also has an app where we can access our flight booking code. By showing this code, from our smartphone, to the check-in officer at the airport, we can do the traditional check-in as well. But of course if we do this then we get the normal paper boarding pass from the airport.

I made my hotel reservation with booking.com and just prior to this trip, I noticed the existence of their mobile app from which we could access our booking. Hence, there was no need to print out my booking confirmation as I could just show it with our smartphone. Plus, the app also featured the map of the hotel which I could use to navigate my way to the hotel.

A screenshot of the Booking.com app

And to explore our destination, there are plenty of apps available there that assist us in our trip; which show basic information like the map and the sites of interest up to the currency rate! Some are free, some we have to pay a charge. Okay, even though admittedly indeed there is the nice feeling of holding a paper map when travelling as it provides the sense of being somewheren foreign, haha😆 . But you get the point, technically (at least in some destinations), there is no need in using the traditional printed documents anymore.

And how did my experiment go?

It went nice and smoothly, actually. Even though for the city map I ended up taking the free paper map provided by the hotel. But it didn’t count because it was free and it was already printed anyway, I guess, haha😛 . For the flight, I knew this would not be a problem because I had tried it before.

The hotel I was stying, however, was already very environment-friendly where we had to check in using this machine instead:

A check-in machine at the hotel.

Another advantage of a paperless trip was that I did not have to think where to throw those useless printouts (of flight details, hotel reservations, maps, etc) after the trip anymore because, well, those useless printouts did not exist in the first place😉 .

***

So, overall I think it was a successful experiment. Will I do it again in the future? For sure! Will I do it in all of my upcoming trips? Well, I don’t think so because, unfortunately, I still believe there are still destinations in this planet where I feel like the presence of a printed ticket or hotel reservation is still necessary.